NATO chief to urge allies to boost Afghan fight

Seville (Spain), Feb 8: NATO's top operational commander will urge the alliance today to step up efforts to crush an expected Taliban offensive in Afghanistan but many allies remain reluctant to come forward, officials said.

US General Bantz Craddock will present defence ministers meeting in the Spanish city of Seville with plans to bolster the NATO force along the border with Pakistan and in the southern heartlands of the Taliban.

The United States and Britain have in past weeks announced reinforcements of the 33,000-strong NATO force, half of whose troops are now supplied by the two allies alone, but want to see other countries share more of the burden.

''It is a question of solidarity. They do not want to be the only ones to be stepping up in this regard,'' said an alliance source who requested anonymity ahead of talks also due to focus on NATO peacekeeping in the breakaway Serb province of Kosovo.

NATO is planning for Taliban insurgents to step up violence in coming weeks as snows melt and the weather gets warmer. The Islamic militant group successfully over-ran the town of Musa Qala in the southern Helmand province last week.

Craddock, who took over as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe in December, is due to set out plans to deploy two new battalions, around 2,000 troops, to the east close to the border with Pakistan, plus a further battalion in the south.

Those deployments are seen covered by new US and British pledges which together will add a further 3,000 troops to the NATO force in coming months.

Alliance sources said Craddock still needed nations to provide a few hundred more forces in the south, plus up to 2,000 personnel as crews for helicopters and transport planes. Further forces would be needed in four months when the tours of duty of some 3,200 US troops came to an end.

Italian Protest

Yet Spain, the Netherlands, France and Turkey have ruled out near-term reinforcements. Germany, which on Wednesday confirmed plans to send six reconnaissance jets to the south, has resisted calls to deploy troops outside the relatively calm north.

The atmosphere before the meeting soured on Tuesday as Italy protested to the United States and five other allies for publishing a letter in an Italian newspaper calling for greater support for the Afghan mission.

Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, whose government faces infighting about its existing 1,900-troop commitment, wrote back to the envoys expressing ''surprise and disapproval''.

With more than 4,000 people killed in violence, last year was the bloodiest in Afghanistan since US-led forces toppled the Taliban Islamist government in 2001. After a winter lull, NATO expects the fighting to restart in coming months.

The Bush administration sees the next 12 months as a crunch year in which it must show voters it is getting the upper hand against insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reuters